Our athletes on right track with diet

Canada’s top athletes, like Charles Hamelin (seen here winning a speedskating race on Feb. 3), don’t consume a great deal more than the recommended daily caloric intake for adults of their age.Igor Yakunin
/ The Associated Press

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MONTREAL — Much was printed about the diet U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps claimed represented an average training day leading into the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Weighing in at 12,000 calories, his workouts were fuelled by a breakfast that included three fried egg sandwiches, an omelette, bowl of grits, French toast and three pancakes. Lunch and dinner weren’t too shabby either, featuring about a pound of pasta per meal along with pizza, energy drinks and shakes.

So legendary are his eating habits that it was the No. 1 diet typed into Google’s search engine in 2012, the year the 6-foot-4, 185-pound Phelps earned four gold and two silver medals at the London Olympic Games.

The idea that elite athletes can eat enough for two, or four in the case of Phelps, is a popular misconception despite their calorie-burning lifestyle. So while Phelps may indeed be the exception, how many calories does the average athlete consume daily?

Kelly Anne Erdman of the University of Calgary Sport Medicine Centre reviewed food diaries completed by 324 of Canada’s top athletes training at eight elite athlete training centres across the country. The athletes, who represented 41 sports (26 summer, 15 winter), included one rest day in their three-day cycle.

The diaries revealed that the average caloric intake for a Canadian male athlete is 3,055 calories. Surprisingly it’s just slightly above the ideal caloric intake for a 19- to 30-year-old male, which according to Health Canada ranges from 2,500 to 3,000 calories depending on their level of daily physical activity.

Canadian female athletes consumed 2,392 calories daily, again only slightly more than the recommended 1,900-2,350 calories that 19- to 30-year-old women should consume daily.

Erdman suggests that the athletes were short of their ideal daily caloric intake by about 300 calories, a phenomenon other similar studies of athletes has replicated. But she also suggests that self-reported food diaries often under-report daily food intake by about 20 per cent, which could boost calorie counts into a range more suitable for highly active elite athletes.

The athletes’ diaries also revealed that they weren’t eating enough carbohydrates, the fuel of choice for working muscles.

The same can’t be said for protein, however. For the most part, they consumed over and above the recommended 1.2 to 1.7 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight athletes should take in per day.

As for how those calories were broken down during the day, the majority of athletes followed a similar schedule of three meals and two snacks with a tendency of back-loading their calories toward the end of the day. Breakfasts were their lightest meal, with snacks counting for about one-quarter of their total daily caloric intake (641 calories), a slightly lower snack count than the general Canadian population.

Erdman suggests that eating often helps athletes time their consumption to avoid any discomfort related to eating too soon or too much before a workout. It may also allow for greater food variety while still consuming the extra calories needed to fuel a high-energy lifestyle.

Marielle Ledoux, director of the faculty of Medicine and Nutrition at the University of Montreal, agrees that athletes need to time their meals to best suit their training schedules, but cautions that the three-meal, two-snack regimen isn’t always ideal.

“Not all athletes should eat the same,” she said, citing that the diet needs and timing of meals is largely dependent on the training schedule and the physical demands of the sport.

It’s worth noting that the data collected in this study didn’t indicate the athletes’ sport or the time of day they scheduled their training and how many workouts they participated in per day. Not all athletes expend the same amount of energy during a training session and not all athletes are looking to achieve the same body composition. Bobsledders and gymnasts have very different body types and eat accordingly. Distance athletes or athletes who train two or three times a day will have very different energy needs than those whose training volume is much lighter.

“Looking at the total number of calories doesn’t tell the whole story,” Ledoux said.

Another interesting discovery of athletes’ eating habits is the fact that they dialed back on their calories during rest days, eating about 300 fewer calories than on training days.

Overall, Ledoux says the data suggest Canadian elite athletes are on the right track when it comes to their eating habits, which she attributes to improved access to nutritionists and a better understanding of how nutrition affects performance. There is room for improvement, but it’s clear that they are working hard to eat well on training and non-training days.

The same can’t be said about younger, less experienced athletes, suggests Ledoux, who is in the process of studying similar data collected at the Canada and Quebec Games.

“Some of those kids were eating french fries for breakfast and then playing a match after that,” she said.

Clearly, elite Canadian athletes acknowledge that their performance is only as good as their last meal. Our younger athletes, however, are somewhat reminiscent of Phelps who, by the way, changed his eating habits leading into London, scaling down his breakfast to a large bowl of oatmeal, a large ham and cheese omelette, fresh fruit and coffee — truly a breakfast of champions.

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